The Climate Post: Climate scientists: It’s war

James Hansen.“We are taking the fight to them because we are … tired of taking the hits,” Scott Mandia, professor of physical sciences at Suffolk County Community College in New York, told the Chicago Tribune. “The notion that truth will prevail is not working. The truth has been out there for the past two decades, and nothing has changed.”

Fatih Birol, head of International Energy Agency, projects rather than a Kunstlerian collapse of civilization or an Amory Lovins-esque graduation to a future of efficiency and renewables, what comes next is a steady ramp up of unconventional fuels, including the tar sands of Alberta and “natural gas liquids.” Look for today’s oil fields to go from around 70 million barrels of oil a day today to around 20 million barrels a day by 2035.

To the extent biofuels are a part of that mix, a new paper says they are even worse than conventional fossil fuels because of the land-use changes they will cause the conversion of “26650 square miles of wild land into fields and plantations, depriving the poor of food and accelerating climate change.”

This November, the biggest winner of all was … coal!: By now most of us know West Virginia just replaced the late Sen. Robert Byrd, who had begun to voice concerns about the intersection of coal and climate change, with Joe Manchin, a candidate who gave us one of the campaign season’s most memorable ads, in which he shot the climate bill. It’s part of a larger trend in state, federal, and even global politics, says author Jeff Goodell, who also argues the more or less unmitigated explosion of the use of coal is driven as much by campaign contributions as its status as the world’s cheapest fuel.

Speculation is rampant that Manchin is being courted to switch parties by the GOP. Notable among the goodies supposedly being dangled in front of Manchin include support for one of his “pet projects” — a plant for turning coal into diesel automotive fuel.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) thinks now that the climate bills introduced by legislators have been declared finally, totally, utterly and completely dead, there’s plenty of opportunity for bipartisan action on energy, as long as it’s limited to nuclear power, electric vehicles, and clean coal.

Failure at Copenhagen upped the price of avoiding Klimakatastrophe $1 trillion: Last year’s International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook pegged the cost of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions so as to avoid exceeding 450 parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide (the threshold the U.N. has set as the upper limit for a “safe” climate) at $10.6 trillion. Failure at Copenhagen has boosted that price to $11.6 trillion, which suggests Mother Nature is engaging in some seriously usurious carbon accounting.